I was born and raised in cosmopolitan Mumbai, formerly Bombay, to a household that had both conservative and liberal influences and a lineage of entrepreneurship.

The India of the ‘60s and ‘70s was chaotic, unorganized and in some respects isolated from the world. At college, I discovered how fragmented our world was and it created a hunger to study liberal arts which I satisfied through voracious reading alongside my management studies.

On graduating from my MBA class at Boston University, I settled on a corporate career starting as a banker, later as a management consultant and ending as a general management professional. While much of my career was spent in conforming to the laws of the mechanistic corporate world, I experienced two fundamental shifts during my tenure at IBM.

The first occurred in 2011 when IBM, celebrating its centenary year, urged every employee to take-on a day of service on IBM pay and I opted to volunteer for V Care Foundation, a cancer care NGO. Later in 2017, I was one of few IBMers selected for the IBM Service Corps (ISC), a skills-based volunteering program, and deputed to Morocco. ISC resulted in an accelerated realisation that for social and environmental impact to be sustainable, it was essential to bring synergy between the private and non-profit sectors, governments and civil society.